January Wrap Up

This month I took a bit of a break from really trying to keep two horses progressing forward and focused mostly on Goggles. Ben chilled out some and mostly hung with his friends/caused chaos by harassing his friends. 

	Ben	Goggles
Training rides	1	0
Lessons	2	1 jump, 1 dressage
Hacks	3 – 1 ponied	1
Ground work, lunge, long line	1 lunge	0
Flat rides	4	9
Conditioning rides	1- 20 min trot, 3x2 min canter	0
XC school	1	1
Shows	0	HJ – warm up day and 3 x crossrail courses

Goggles: 

January started with Goggles moving up to his new farm, much closer to me. This also made all of his rides my responsibility. I think we managed okay. We've spent the month working on decreasing his tether to the other horses by gradually venturing further and further from home on a cool down hack at the end of our rides. He's doing great with this, but still frets when they're far away in the field. He's also made huge strides with trailering with the help of my husband. We're not self-loading or totally relaxed still, but we are SO MUCH BETTER. 

And he had his first acupuncture appointment and got a GREAT review of how his neck was feeling from our favorite chiro vet. He's got another acupuncture session on Thursday. 

He also got out to our first under saddle show together and exceeded all my expectations by behaving like such a grown up horse. He was great in the ring too and showed just how brave he is by jumping cross rails with funky standards. 

We also had a cross country school and worked on softening his back over jumps by "riding him like he is trained". This was mentally hard for me, but we got there eventually. 

Ben: Not too much to report here, as said above, he's enjoying a bit of down time while I sort out finding my joy in horses and NOT having them feel like full time job number two.